Facebook tip: How to turn on (or off) individual email notifications

Jhesa writes: How can I receive individual Facebook email notification again, instead of that summary email notification that I’m receiving? I’m much more comfortable with the individual email notifications, especially since Facebook access is blocked at my company.

Greetings, Jhesa! If you want Facebook to shoot you an email each time someone posts a message to your timeline, comments on one of your status updates, “likes” a photo you’re in, or otherwise does something related to your profile, all you have to do is change a key account setting.

But here’s the thing: you should also take some time to tweak your notification preferences, or else you may wind up buried in a pile of Facebook emails.

Here’s what you do:

Click the little downward arrow in the top-right corner of any Facebook page, then select Account Settings from the pull-down menu.

Click the Notifications tab in the left column, then find the gray “Email Frequency” box at the top of the page.

Want to start getting individual email notifications from Facebook? Then clear the “Email Frequency” checkbox. If you just want the occasional summary email, make sure the box is checked.

If you un-checked the box, your next step is to customize your Facebook notification settings—and be warned, there are a lot of them. Start by looking at the notifications in the “Recent Notifications” section, and toggle the email icon for each depending on whether you’d want an individual email alert for a specific event.

Next, check out the “All Notifications” sections, and start clicking the Edit links next to the various categories (such as “Facebook,” “Photos,” “Pages,” “Wall Comments”). Within each category, you’ll find a series of checkboxes covering just about any Facebook event imaginable. Just check or clear the checkboxes as you see fit.

Last but not least, you can change the email address where Facebook sends your notifications by clicking the General tab in your account settings. From there, click the Edit link next to the Email heading, then select or add a new primary email address.

Bonus tip

One way to keep your Facebook email notifications under control is to filter incoming Facebook messages into a special Facebook folder in your email account.

In Gmail, for example, you can create a filter from the Mail Settings menu; just select the Filter tab, click the “Create a new filter” link, type “Facebook” into the “From” field, check the “Apply the label” checkbox, select “New label” from the pull-down menu, then create a new label called “Facebook.”